Tyan K8WE

[Damian Gerow]

After all the speculation on boards recently, and the hubbub about avoiding
and not avoiding nForce-based motherboards, I found myself in posession of
the Tyan K8WE.  I'll leave generic hardware impressions aside, and focus on
the functionality...  (note that all this has been posted to
<http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html>):

The board actually works surprisingly well.  I was expecting to have a much
bigger headache getting everything up and going.  5.3 *does* seem to work a
little bit better for some reason (I originally thought ACPI regression, but
I'm currently running RELENG_5 cvsup'ed this afternoon with ACPI).

The on-board nVidia BGE controllers *DO NOT WORK* with ports/nvnet.  You
*will* need to have a PCI (/PCI-X) Ethernet card to use networking.  I'm
currently using an Intel 82550 Pro/100 card in a PCI-X slot just fine.

My sound drivers from opensound.com don't work.  That's something I'll chase
down with them.

I cannot boot into single-user mode in 5.4.  The box just doesn't take input
from the keyboard (I haven't tried serial console) when specifying the root
shell to use.  Oddly, hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL will successfully reboot the
machine (i.e. FreeBSD will go through its shutdown process).

Other than that, the board works quite well.  It took me most of the day to
get it going, and I'm still not /convinced/ there's no ACPI issues hanging
around, but there's no complaints in the dmesg, and everything's working
fine.  It's done a few buildworlds (and currently rebuilding firefox) under
the current RELENG_5 build, so it seems to be moderately stable.

  - Damian